SLAB // Structure in(g) LAnguage LAB

SLAB is the research group in the Language Technologies Institute at CMU led by Emma Strubell. We do research at the intersection of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. The high-level motivation for our work is democratizing AI (specifically, NLP). This means:

• Everyone should be able to shape, and shape uses of, NLP technology, with or without access to substantial computational or financial resources;
• The NLP community should provide text analysis solutions that are useful across a broad array of applications for solving real-world problems, not just tasks with the highest potential to increase capital.

In SLAB we focus on research that pushes the NLP community towards these goals, which manifests in a variety of more specific research directions including:

• Efficient machine learning for NLP: training, fine-tuning, and inference.
• Data efficiency: transfer learning and generalization.
• NLP for expert domains such as scientific articles and legal text.
• Structured prediction.
• Ethical and policy concerns in ML and NLP.